Published on Tuesday, August 15, 2006 by Craig Murray
The UK Terror plot: What's Really Going On?
by Craig Murray

I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers
to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to
detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security
experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had
the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount
of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin
machine.
So this, I believe, is the true story.
None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane
ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency
of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber
for quite some time.
In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports,
it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt
that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever
rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.
What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for
over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just
Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need
for early arrests.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing
plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had
not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators
of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like
canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary
information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators
all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert
torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.
The gentleman being "interrogated" had fled the UK after being
wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago.
That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also
be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within
these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money
outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim
community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities
that have nothing to do with terrorism.
We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing
the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that
is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed
for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however
dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media
has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.
We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary,
making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and
complaining that "Some people don't get" the need to abandon
all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own
propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests.
There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political
tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in
the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother
with a six week old baby.
For those who don't know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist
with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy
he was the Communist Party's "Enforcer", (in days when the
Communist Party ran Stirling University Students' Union, which it should
not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover).
Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.
We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to
make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the "Loner"
profile you would expect - a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have
happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance,
and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have
been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity - that
is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.
In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that
the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of
the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist
legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That
is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged,
80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of
arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism,
but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through
the wreck of the lives they had shattered.
Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.

Craig Murray was British Ambassador
to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/world/europe/22cnd-britain.html
The decision to press formal charges followed days of widening public
skepticism about the true extent of the suspected plot, first disclosed
on Aug. 10, when the police warned that conspirators had planned to commit
mass murder on what one officer called an “unimaginable scale.”
The information disclosed Monday gave a sense of the scope of the investigation,
beginning with months of surveillance that produced “highly significant
video and audio recordings” before the Aug. 10 arrests, said Peter
Clarke, the head of London’s anti-terrorism police. Since then,
he said, the police have searched “69 houses, flats and business
premises, vehicles and open spaces” and recovered 400 computers,
200 cellphones and 8,000 data storage devices such as memory sticks and
DVD’s.
The aim in offering such detail at the news conference on Monday —
at which no questions were permitted — seemed twofold: to give the
public a glimpse into the kind of evidence that was being amassed and
to offset charges that the police had overreacted to a threat. But the
credibility of the allegations will not be tested until the accused are
taken before a jury, in a trial that is not expected to begin for at least
two years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/business/22road.html
Nobody has ever accused me of being a shill for the airlines or a Pollyanna
about air travel. But I have to say that I got from Point A to Point B
last week without a hassle. Credit must be paid to the airlines, the security
agency and to sensible fellow travelers. Now let’s go back almost
two weeks to the scenes of frightened chaos in London, where people once
faced down the blitz with aplomb. All of a sudden, Heathrow and other
airports seemed to be in pandemonium after the police announced —
and the details are still sketchy, if you ask me — that they had
thwarted a bombing plot.

LOS ANGELES--Attention, citizens of the national community: stay tuned
for a HomeSec alert! A fiendish plot has been uncovered! Terrorists loyal
to the sinister forces of Eastasia have been apprehended! It is another
glorious victory for the homeland! All hail Oceania!
It was hard not to suffer a 1984 flashback on August 10th, when UK authorities
and their rhetorical American partners claimed to have rounded up more
than two dozen British Muslims accused of--or so they claimed--participation
in an elaborate plot to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale."

Comment US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff appeared relaxed,
even amused, during a Washington press conference where he explained
the American response to the UK airport terror emergency.
A few security inconveniences will be put in place until the Transportation
Security Administration (TSA) figures out how better to deal with the
threat of liquid explosives that the British believe are now in play.
The new measures are confined to preventing US travelers from carrying
liquids into the aircraft cabin, with exceptions for common-sense items
such as drugs and infant formula. Otherwise, US passengers will be permitted
to carry the usual items on board.
The overall terror threat level for airlines has been raised from yellow
to orange, except that the level for UK flights bound for the USA has
been raised to red. When asked why DHS had made this exception, Chertoff
explained that it was meant to harmonize the US assessment with the
British assessment: a polite way of saying that, for now, America is
willing to humor UK officials.
Chertoff's demeanor and body language belied any notion that there's
a serious emergency. This means either that US officials are quite underwhelmed
by the UK's evidence of a feasible terrorist plot, or that the US government's
casual indifference toward catastrophic loss of life and property, as
exhibited when New Orleans was destroyed, is the new American attitude.
In favor of option one, we have a recent history of British eagerness
to announce breakthroughs in the struggle against the forces of darkness,
with nothing to show for it. We have Jean Charles de Menezes shot to
bits at point-blank range for behaving oddly just after the 7/7 atrocity.
We have the imaginary ricin plot. We have the imaginary chemical bomb
plot. And we have the imaginary red-mercury suitcase nuke plot.
There's been a lot of crying wolf in London, so it should surprise no
one to find that the Americans have heard enough of it. (Although, to
be fair, Washington has trumpeted its share of counterterrorist breakthroughs
involving semi-harmless losers, but that's no reason for them to buy
into anyone else's.)
In favor of option two, we have Hurricane Katrina, heckuva-job-Brownie,
and government indifference toward mass suffering, death, and property
destruction on a scale that makes 9/11 look like a garden party. This
suggests that 9/11 served its purpose by leading to endless mass suffering,
death, and property destruction in Iraq, which is all it ever was worth
to the Bush Administration.
According to this hypothesis, phony agonizing over 9/11 got Junior his
longed-for war in Iraq, so there's no further need to shed crocodile
tears and whine publicly about the blood of innocents. To a government
willing to brush off the destruction of an entire US city, and to preside
over the destruction of a foreign nation, a few planes blowing up over
the Atlantic is small potatoes.
Whether we're seeing the true Bushie callousness laid bare, or a healthy
American skepticism toward HMG's repeated exhibition of a phony terrorist
menace as a pretext to introduce the Kafka-esque legislation favored
by Tony Blair and John Reid, will be answered by and by. There will
be successful prosecutions, or there will be official excuses verging
on an apology, but not quite amounting to one.
We will see.

August 15 [2006]. The recent alleged terror plot was barely in the planning
stages, the supposed attackers had not bought airline tickets, the whole
thing was totally under surveillance, and the British police wanted to
wait longer but were pushed by the Americans to make the arrests sooner,
obviously for political effect.
It wouldn't surprise me if these "terrorists" were just dreamers
who would not have got half as far in their plot without the police spies
pushing them. And it almost doesn't need to be said that this whole spectacle,
on a deeper level, is just a big joke to see how much degradation humans
will submit to in the name of fear.

Published on Monday, August 14, 2006 by the Palm Beach Post (Florida)
When All Else Fails, GOP Dials 9/11
by Randy Schultz

It's an even-numbered year, and we're getting near Labor Day. So, it
was predictable that the Bush administration and Republicans would exploit
the foiled terrorism plot in the United Kingdom to save their political
hides.
The campaign began Wednesday, one day after Sen. Joe Lieberman lost
the Democratic primary in Connecticut. Knowing of the upcoming arrests
in Britain, Vice President Dick Cheney began the demagoguery. He accused
Democrats of wishing for a return to "sort of the pre-9/11 mind-set
in terms of how we deal with the world we live in." On Thursday,
the Republican leadership in the House began calling the Democrats "Defeatocrats"
who want to "stand aside in the Global War on Terror."

Terra! Terra! Terra!
The alleged U.K. terror plot has been investigated for months by British
intelligence, and the idea that the airliner attacks were planned for
today seems to be nothing more than political fabrication and media hysteria.

It is a week since news broke in London about an alleged plot to blow
up nine commercial jetliners, and there are emerging indicators that
Bush and Blair exaggerated the truth about the actual readiness of the
so-called plot. And yes, I mean so-called plot. Why would Bush and Blair
hype a terrorist threat? A very simple answer. The White House was on
notice that Seymour Hersh's story in the New Yorker claimed that the
Bush administration encouraged Israel to invade Lebanon as part of a
broader scheme to set the stage for war with Iran. Tony Blair, Bush's
enabler, went along with the ruse.